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Welcome to another Artist Highlight from the As You Wish Helmet Project! This helmet along with 49 others will be displayed a Star Wars: Celebration VI in Orlando, FL from Aug 23-26. Starting Thursday, August 23 these helmets will be auctioned on eBay by the Make-A-Wish Foundation with 100% of the proceeds going to support Make-A-Wish.

TSD: I've been collecting and making Star Wars stuff as long as I can remember. Eventually, I was able to transition my passion for sculpture, as well as restoring and displaying original movie props and costumes into a full time pursuit. Through my company, Tom Spina Designs, I work with a team of amazing artists and we've been fortunate enough to create for several official Star Wars projects now, including prototypes for Sideshow Collectibles, and recreating nearly a dozen Star Wars cantina aliens for Volkswagen's Super Bowl commercial this year.

TDH: What drew you to the As You Wish Helmet Project?

TSD: I've always loved projects where a group of artists are given the same set of materials and allowed to imagine and create. The Darth Vader project was amazing and I knew then if we ever had the chance to participate in one, we'd jump at it. Plus, it's Boba Fett!

TDH: What was your inspiration for Boba Recall?

TSD: Lunch… and classic, old-school, practical movie FX magic by a master. But mostly lunch! Mike Thomas and Patrick Louie, who both work with me at our NY studio, and I went to lunch one day and sat at a diner bouncing around ideas. The strongest one by far, was Boba Recall. Rob Bottin's brilliant work on Total Recall burned an image into the mind of everyone who saw the film and we thought it would be fun to try to bring that to life for the As You Wish Project.

TDH: Tell us a little about the process of creating this helmet.

TSD: Definitely a big undertaking! But still fun. I sort of broke down how the piece would lay out and what the "sections" would be. Pat did a great job chopping up the helmet, then re-assembling it in its new, stepped configuration. I did the paint work on the helmet, choosing the Pre-pro 2 as my inspiration, since the helmet we were provided had lineage tracing back to that one. We sourced a great life cast of Arnold and I did the paint and hair work on that to get him looking a little bit lifelike.

TDH: Now that the helmet is finished, if there is one thing you could change or do differently, what would it be?

TSD: I would love to do a silicone head for Arnold… just really push the realism a little bit further.

TDH: With your helmet finished, what is your next project?

TSD: We're lucky in that we've got a number of things happening. We're wrapping up the second prototype for Sideshow Collectibles' Life Sized Boba Fett, working on a few custom mannequins for original movie costume at the moment and working on a pretty major restoration and display for one of Stuart Freeborn's absolutely incredible original man-ape costumes worn in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. If anyone wants to take a sneak peek at what we're doing, we update our Facebook page all the time with behind the scenes images and info: http://www.facebook.com/TomSpinaDesigns